The Forgotten Holocaust (Ben Hope, Book 10) (17 page)

As Mayor Finn McCrory knew very well, not all of his granddaddy’s story could be divulged to the public.

On his arrival in New York City on a cold and windy October’s day in 1851 after a long, harsh sea voyage, the immigrant Padraig McCrory, or Paddy as he’d later become known, stepped off the ship to discover a New World where a strong and growing core of Irish patriots were fiercely supportive of their own. Thanks to that support and the connections that it fostered, he’d quickly found his feet. He was a determined and single-minded man, not afraid to work. He knew horses, and America was the land of horses. By 1858, still playing heavily on his trademark Irish identity, Paddy McCrory had risen up to become a successful dealer in equine flesh, with livery yards all across New York State. When the Civil War broke out three years later, he secured supply contracts with the huge mobilising Union army that multiplied his wealth twenty-fold. By the end of that war, at the age of forty-three, he’d married Mary O’Kelly, an immigrant beauty from Mitchelstown twenty-five years his junior. Nothing would have pleased him more than to have a son and heir, but to Mary’s heartbreak and Paddy’s infinite disappointment, the couple found themselves unable to have children.

After fifteen years of building his business in the east, Paddy McCrory set his sights on new pastures, and in 1868 took Mary west to Kansas to realise a new dream out there in the Promised Land. It was a place of limitless opportunities for a man of wealth and ambition. From horses, Paddy diversified to that other staple of life on the frontier – guns. Percussion muskets to scatterguns to Colt’s patent revolvers to the new Henry repeating rifles that had been the scourge of the Confederate army in the closing stages of the war; he couldn’t sell enough of them and quickly developed a complete lack of scruple about who his customers were. He sold to lawmen and bandits alike. He sold to the European settlers who sought to protect themselves against Indian raids, then sold to the Indians so that they could better attack the settlers. Within a couple of years, Paddy McCrory had become richer than ever as one of the biggest traders of arms in the emergent Midwest.

Two decades later, Paddy ‘Boss’ McCrory was still strong and healthy and more ambitious than ever when the Oklahoma land rush of 1889 began. After that year’s Indian Appropriations Bill essentially had opened up two million acres of Indian Territory to anyone with the means and manpower to grab it on a first-come, first-served basis, he jumped at the chance to join in the frenzy. He became one of what were known as the ‘Sooners’, the name given to those opportunists who moved to the new territory ahead of the legal date of 22 April 1889 so that they could pounce on the choicest bits of land before anyone else got a look in. ‘Boss’ laid claim to a vast acreage of prime ranch and pasture land that straddled miles of the Arkansas River, and in the inevitable land wars that followed he defended it with a small army of hired guns, professional killers who plied their trade with ruthless efficiency.

The area was booming. The newly founded Oklahoma City was established in half a day, bursting from a population of near zero to ten thousand within literally hours. Paddy McCrory was already the wealthiest man in the new state, and set to become even more so.

Soon after his seventieth birthday, Mary took ill with fever and died. Paddy mourned her, but more than anything he mourned the fact that he would never have an heir to inherit his fortune. He found solace in seeking out new territories to buy and sell, and in conducting campaigns against the scattered groups of Indians who were still bold enough to contest the white man’s supremacy. How many Cherokee and others were slaughtered at the hands of his riders, nobody ever knew.

Old Paddy McCrory himself just kept on going and going. Portraits showed a large, tough and grizzled man of formidable bearing and stern manner, with piercing wild eyes and thick white hair, which he wore long. Time had seemed barely to touch him – he believed that old age was a state of mind, nothing more. When at the age of eighty-four he fell into a dispute with a cattle baron who tried to swindle him over a land deal, Paddy McCrory had ridden alone to the man’s ranch and beaten him almost to death with his bare fists.

Finally, at the age of ninety, love re-entered his life in the comely form of Charlotte Polk, the daughter of a Tennessee planter. Truthfully, it had been something of a marriage of convenience: he was rich, she was young, he wanted a son, she was willing to provide in return for the lifestyle he could offer his new bride. It took some doing due to Paddy’s advancing years, but finally by the age of ninety-four, he’d been given the heir he’d always wanted. The proud parents named the baby boy Joseph. It was 1916.

Paddy McCrory died shortly before the boy’s fifth birthday, after a brief and painful illness. In his final years he was tormented by guilt over the wicked things he’d done during the course of his long and eventful life; on his deathbed he confessed to terrible sins and wept as he begged the Lord’s forgiveness.

After his death, his widow Charlotte raised their son by herself and was a proud and loving mother. The family business took a bad hit in the Crash of ’29, and for some years the spectre of poverty loomed over them. Then, in 1935, when Joe was nineteen, the McCrorys’ ailing fortunes were spectacularly rescued: the chance discovery of black gold on their land turned out to portend the biggest oil strike the state would see for another decade.

With the boom of the burgeoning new auto industry, Big Joe McCrory was soon to ascend to the throne of an empire and become the youngest millionaire in Oklahoma.

The rest, as they say, was history.

From the Cox Business Center, Finn drove east on Route 66 with the top down and Foster and Allen’s
Fields of Athenry
blasting on the car stereo. He then cut southwards, passing East Tulsa Bible Chapel and the Church of God of the Apostolic before arriving at Harvey Young Airport on 135th East Avenue. This was the smallest of the city’s three airports and the base for some sixty aircraft, one of which was Finn’s personal Gulfstream. Lately, he’d been making a lot of trips in it down south over Texas to Nuevo Laredo just south of the Mexican border. Nobody in Tulsa asked questions. He could fly in and out whenever he wanted, skirting the city’s air traffic control area, and had his own private hangar.

The place was convenient in other ways, too. It was one of the only secret rendezvous points that were safe, from Finn’s point of view. His recognisability as mayor made it tricky to conduct illicit meetings with the employees of his real and main business, the covert and rapidly growing enterprise that the likes of Janet Reiss and the rest of his City Hall staff knew nothing about, and which – out of necessity – he’d become highly skilled at keeping totally separate from his political life.

People just assumed that his wealth came from his father. A lot of it did. But Finn’s own money was pouring in faster and faster these days. And if he succeeded in becoming governor, the power he’d have would allow him to open the floodgates and shoot up the Oklahoma rich list.

Maybe he’d get even richer than Big Joe. Finn secretly dreamed of being able to tell the old bastard that on his deathbed, just to spoil it for him at the very end.

The dusty white GMC van was parked beside Finn’s hangar with its windows down. As the Mercedes rolled to a halt, the van’s doors opened and Ritter and Moon emerged. Ritter wore military-issue sunglasses and was all in black. Moon was in a blood-spatter T-shirt that said ‘
ZOMBIE HUNTER – KILL OR BE EATEN
’. Classy, that Moon.

Finn got out of the car, glancing furtively about to ensure nobody was spying on them.

‘Hey, nice boots, boss,’ Moon said. Moon resented his employer’s fancy clothes, just like he resented the two-hundred-thousand-dollar Merc. The McCrorys ate out at the upscale Palace Café two or three nights a week. Moon was more of a Dirty’s Tavern kind of guy.

‘What you been doing, chasing parked cars?’ Finn asked, pointing at Moon’s split lip and the purple bruising on his face.

‘Ain’t nuthin’,’ Moon replied sullenly, and popped another stick of nicotine gum.

‘You boys sure took your time getting back here. Let’s step inside the office.’ Finn motioned towards the hangar’s entrance. He led them into the shade of the building, where the Gulfstream sat cooling after its return flight from Madeira. The two men followed him up the gangway into the plush privacy of the aircraft, which Finn had had specially upholstered in emerald green with little golden shamrock motifs. He threw himself into his favourite seat and looked expectantly at them. ‘Well? You got something for me?’

‘There was a hitch,’ Ritter said.

Finn stared at him. ‘What the hell does that mean, a hitch? All you had to do was fetch me a buncha old books.’

‘No sweat, boss,’ Moon said, chewing. ‘We dealt with the situation.’

‘I’ll decide when there’s no sweat, okay? I want to know what happened.’

‘Relax, Mr Mayor,’ Ritter said. ‘Your journals are all gone up in smoke.’

‘Just like Brennan and the other asshole,’ Moon said.

Ritter shot him a look. Moon talked too much.

‘What other asshole?’ Finn asked.

‘The guy from the beach,’ Ritter explained. ‘Some guy called Hope. He was the hitch.’

‘From what beach?’ Finn asked in astonishment. ‘You mean in Galway?’

‘Yup. We, uh, we ran into him again.’

‘That who banged Moon up? This Hope guy?’

Ritter nodded. Moon looked down at his feet and muttered, ‘Looks worse’n it is.’

‘What the hell was he doing there?’ Finn demanded.

‘We didn’t exactly engage in small talk,’ Ritter said. ‘He turned up, got in the way, got taken out. End of story, end of problem.’

Finn shook his head, deeply perplexed. ‘He made you, didn’t he? Followed your incompetent asses all the way to Madeira. What is he, a cop? Some kind of goddamn private investigator?’

‘Nobody made us,’ Ritter replied in a flat tone.

‘If he knew something, someone else might,’ Finn said. ‘I want to know more about this sonofabitch.’ Taking out his mini-iPad, he quickly dialled up a news network and returned to the recent story of the unsolved fatal stabbing on the west coast of Ireland. Within seconds, he was scanning quickly through the article. ‘Here he is. The hero who tried to stop the killers. Ben Hope.’

‘That’s the guy,’ Ritter said.

‘Hero my ass,’ Moon muttered.

‘What do we know about this guy?’ Finn demanded.

‘That he’s toast,’ Moon said.

Finn jumped out of the news item and quickly Googled the name. The search results popped up. A mountain in Scotland. A type of blackberry. A real estate salesman in Kansas. A teenage kid in Montreal. Some artist in London, and another Brit doing time for murder. Finn scrolled impatiently down the list.

Then stopped. Peered closely at the screen. ‘Got it. You two, come and look. This is him, right?’

‘That’s him,’ Ritter said, taking off his shades to look at the website image his boss had found.

‘Guy’s a goddamn ex-British soldier.’

‘Fuckin’ lobsterback,’ Moon grunted.

‘Director of some kind of training centre,’ Finn said, reading more. ‘Le Val. Normandy, France.’

Moon shrugged. ‘So? Big deal.’

Ignoring him, Finn went on scouring this Ben Hope’s résumé on the website. Words like ‘tactical’ and ‘specialist’ made him feel distinctly uncomfortable. ‘Crisis response consultant,’ he muttered, frowning.

‘Sounds like bullshit, you ask me,’ Moon said.

‘I didn’t ask for your opinion, Moon. I asked you who the hell this guy is.’

‘Was,’ Ritter corrected him. ‘Some hotshot who thought he’d got the chops. Seen a million of ’em. Don’t worry about it.’ He was still pissed off at Moon for opening his big mouth.

‘Says here he was a major,’ Finn said.

‘Major pain in the butt,’ Moon chuckled. ‘I never did like officers. Who cares why the fucker was there? Maybe he knew Brennan.’

‘Yeah?’ Finn said. ‘And maybe you’re a cretin, Moon.’

‘Can’t be, on account of I ain’t never been to Crete,’ Moon protested.

‘It doesn’t matter any more,’ Ritter said. ‘We handled it. That’s what we do, right?’

‘A man like this isn’t someone I need on my case,’ Finn said, pointing at the iPad screen. ‘You’re definitely sure he’s dead?’

‘As disco,’ Moon said.

‘Forget him,’ Ritter said quietly. ‘He’s history.’

‘He’d damn well better be,’ Finn replied. ‘Because we have some other business to deal with, and I don’t need some meathead getting in the way this time.’ He slipped a blank card from his pocket. On the back of it was written a name and an address in Crosbie Heights. He handed the card to Ritter. ‘This needs to be done quickly and quietly. She can be knocked about a little, but I need her able to talk. Got it?’

‘Who is the bitch?’ Ritter asked, peering at the card.

‘It’s sensitive. She works for my wife.’

Ritter frowned. ‘So?’

‘So, Angela had her staying at the goddamn cabin that night. She was there.’

‘When we …?’

‘Uh-huh. When we took care of Blaylock. Damn woman videoed us and managed to sneak right out from under your noses. How’d you suppose that happened, huh? It’s just luck that the evidence is in safe hands. But we have to make sure there are no copies. That’s why I need her alive. Got that?’

Ritter didn’t need to ask whose safe hands the video evidence was in. He showed the card to Moon, whose eyes glittered. Right up his street.

Finn shook his head, reading Moon’s expression. ‘Not you. She knows your faces. I can’t afford for anything to go wrong.’

‘Nothing will go wrong,’ Ritter said.

‘That so? She already got away once.’

‘Don’t make me beg, boss,’ Moon whined.

‘You heard me,’ Finn said, casting a warning look at each of them in turn. ‘Get one of your guys to take care of it. The sooner the better.’

Ritter currently had upwards of twenty men working under him virtually full-time to run McCrory’s enterprise. He often thought about taking on more, as it was growing so fast. He rasped a hand over the stubble on his head as he reflected for a moment on who to give this job to. ‘Joey Spicer,’ he said.